The President intends to nominate Robert Gordon Card, 48, to be Under Secretary of Energy. He is presently the President and CEO of Kaiser-Hill Company in Colorado, and was previously Executive Vice President of CH2M Hill, Inc. A native of Yakima, Washington, he is graduate of the University of Washington and received his Master's degree in Environmental and Civil Engineering from Stanford University.

Card was chief operating officer at Kaiser-Hill when DOE named it management contractor at its Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site in 1995 and later became the company's president and chief executive. As Under Secretary, he will serve as the department's chief operating officer and oversee its environmental management and science programs. He succeeds MIT's Ernest Moniz, who held the position until the Clinton administration ended in January.

"Bob Card will bring forward a vision that may suggest things need to be done a little differently," Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., told a meeting of the Energy Communities Alliance. "You need someone with practical experience on the ground," Allard said. "He has to be one of the foremost experts on cleanup."